Drew DeVault on the biggest threats for FOSS, and proposed solutions
Drew DeVault on the biggest threats for FOSS, and proposed solutions
🧵 Biggest threats to FOSS and some proposed solutions
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Glad he brought up Discord's quality.
I'm a bit tired of people saying e-mail/IRC work just fine. Yes, they do, but that's not the point. Discord works better for way over a hundred millions users, many of whom rarely ever send mail and aren't interested in learning how IRC or whatever alternative you use works.
It's like instead of collaborating to solve this issue half of the open source community decided they want to die in IRC, while the other half just straight up gave up. Metaphorically. I get why, but it saddens me a little.
Will have to check out Zulip later.
Don't waste your time with Zulip, it is just another corporate messenger.
The IRC "problem" is a lot more complex than "giving up". It is actually a problem of attempted corporate capture on two main occasions.
The first one is Element (matrix) that tried to EEE IRC with their extremely poor bridges and in general Matrix has been binding developer resources on an ultimately failed and over-engineered protocol where the parent company is now pivoting to provide government services.
The second one was the largely failed attempt at a hostile takeover of Freenode, which somehow left the people that were trying to innovate IRC in a really bad spot as those that are mostly standing on the brakes "won" and formed libera.chat. A very phyrric victory, as it pretty much cemented the continued decline of IRC.
If you're willing, I'd appreciate more information on this claim:
Don’t waste your time with Zulip, it is just another corporate messenger.
I tried looking it up myself, but I didn't see anything that bad. Open source, self-hostable, Apache 2 licensed, didn't see any CLA. About the Element thing, that sounds a bit far-fetched, but I'll refrain from saying anything else since I haven't had time to look into it. The Freenode story sounds interesting though, I'll try looking it up later.
The issue is the intended use case and not specific licensing and so on. Zulip targets internal chat in a corporate environment, like MS Teams and the like, which makes it ill suited as a Discord replacement.
Fair point, thanks for sharing. Does that mean you consider fine the use of Zulip by open source development teams? Seeing as their main objective is providing organized chat between core contributors (with some level of outsider participation), that is, generally focused on facilitating the work of the project instead of building a community.
If that team currently has a strong email culture, yes. Zulip is basically a "what if chat was more like threaded email" UI experiment.
Teams that are more used to Slack or Discord will probably hate it though.